Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a storage medium, an information processing apparatus and a control method, and particularly to a technique of generating an object under a hardware restriction.
Description of the Related Art
In recent years, in conjunction with an improvement in computational capabilities of processors such as CPUs and GPUs, a rendering expression that is close to the real world has become possible in the field of computer graphics, and techniques by which it is possible to provide an experience that gives a sense of reality and causes an observer to become more immersed have been proposed. In particular, in the field of computerized games, the so-called open world game format, in which seamless movement in a vast, realistically expressed virtual world can be provided to a player, has achieved a certain assessment from the perspective of degrees of freedom of manipulation (Japanese Patent Laid-Open No. 2012-213485).
Reality presentation in an open world game, as in Japanese Patent Laid-Open No. 2012-213485, is provided not just by beautiful graphics based on a faithful rendering reproduction of the real world (illumination computations or the like), but also by, for example, reproducing a state in which a character, a movable gimmick object (props), or the like dynamically changes in accordance with the situation. In particular in recent years it is possible to cause a player to perceive a higher sense of reality by performing various computations based on a so-called physical simulation that reproduces behavior in accordance with the laws of nature. By implementing so-called artificial intelligence or the like by which a character performs decision-making in accordance with predetermined information, based on variable information that indicates a current state or information embedded in a located field, it is possible to cause a player to recognize the character as an individual that has an individuality.
In contrast, because an implementation for improving such a sense of reality typically consumes many computation resources and memory resources, even if the scale of computational capabilities or memory for a player's game console, PC, or the like improves, there were concerns, for example, that a memory capacity used in holding or loading of corresponding data would be pressed, that an amount of computation that should be caused to terminate within a frame interval would become huge, or the like.
In content such as a game, because provision of necessary game elements that a planner or the like should provide is prioritized, it is necessary to implement measures to improve the reality under hardware restrictions by making processes superior or inferior. However, there is the possibility of not being able to provide a suitable sense of reality by only implementing necessary game elements by performing various computation processing for objects including locating of rendering objects such as a fixed character group, for example. In other words, because reality is something provided based on accidentalness, it is important to construct a desired world-view that dynamically changes in accordance with, for example, a region, time period, the weather, or the like, and to locate and control so-called lively elements, such as objects that have individual variability.
However, a technique that suitably locates and controls lively elements in this way under hardware restrictions, that is by using limited resources that can dynamically change in accordance with required elements, has thus far not been proposed.